Google Workspace Changes: Unlimited Storage will Soon be a Thing of the Past

Google is making changes to the way storage works in Google Workspace with today’s blog focusing on how these changes impact education customers. Right off the bat we can state that the changes won’t be enforced until July 2022, so schools have some time to get into compliance. It is also important to note that only about 1 out of every 100 education accounts are currently over the limit, according to Google.

So what are the new limits? For accounts with under 20,000 users, it’s pretty simple. Those accounts get 100TB (one terabyte is equal to 1000 gigabytes) of pooled storage for all users to share. Accounts with over 20,000 users must contact Google support to determine how much additional pooled storage they start with, but I would expect it to expand more or less in a linear fashion with a school twice the size having twice the base pooled storage.

Accounts get an additional 100GB (gigabyte) of pooled storage for each G Suite Enterprise for Education or Teaching and Learning Upgrade license. Education Plus users will gain 20GB of pooled storage per license. So a school with 10,000 students and Education Plus licenses would get 100TB (base) + 20TB (10K Teaching and Learning licenses X 20GB) for a total of 120TB of pooled storage.

Google provides several tools allowing you to see how much storage your account is using. As a super admin you can login to admin.google.com, then go to Reports. In Reports, go to Reports -> Apps Reports -> Accounts. Scroll down to the bottom and you should be able to see Total Storage Used. 

However, if you want to get more insight into your Google Workspace account’s storage usage and files, you may need a tool such as KIT Central. With KIT Central you can determine your top storage users and see what files they are storing. You also have the ability to search your entire organization’s drive for ISO or movie files, among many other common file types. You can then notify individuals whose storage usage isn’t in line with your policies or even schedule files for deletion right from KIT Central.